Free legal service Regional Alliance West is inundated with new clients affected by the cost of living crisis
More than 150 people in Western Australia’s Mid West have been denied access to free legal aid at a time when unprecedented numbers of people are seeking help.
The nonprofit organization Regional Alliance West (RAW) admitted 458 cases of people and families in need in the six months to July this year, but had to turn away 146 more.
Chief of Operations Chris Gabelish said many of the rejected cases were families, so the actual number of people without assistance was higher.
RAW is based in Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth.
It is the only legal service on the 1,500km stretch between Joondalup and Karratha and provides civil litigation advice to clients from several towns in the region and in remote areas.
The organization also provides emergency assistance, such as food, utility bills, car registration and doctor’s prescriptions. Gabelish said the number of people needing these services has also skyrocketed.
Chris Gabelish says it is extremely difficult to turn away people in need. (ABC Midwest and Wheatbelt: Brianna Melville)
234 of the recent court cases between February and July involved people who had never used the service before.
Gabelish, who has worked in social assistance for 40 years, said those in need of assistance increasingly belong to a growing class he described as the “working poor” who have been hit particularly hard by the rising cost of living.
“I have never seen so many new people here,” he said.
“This is a terrible indictment of the cost of living that people are actually suffering from at the moment.”
“We can’t do anything for you”
Mr Gabelish said the people RAW helps often have problems with family violence or domestic violence and that many of them are at risk of homelessness.
“We had to turn away 40 people (from the homeless service),” Mr Gabelish said.
“Imagine being in the situation of having to tell a homeless person, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you.’ That’s wrong.”
“I have a pretty tough turtle shell… (but) it’s still very, very difficult to tell somebody who has small children who are hungry that… we can’t do anything for you.”
The problems RAW faces are reflected in legal services across Australia, where more than 368,000 people are turned away each year, according to Community Legal Centre Australia.
In Geraldton and other Midwestern towns, at least 40 people recently required legal advice for homelessness. (ABC Midwest and Wheatbelt: Chris Lewis)
Mr Gabelish said that although the federal government had promised the centres an increase in funding in 2023, it was “far from” meeting their needs.
“It’s not that Australia is the poorest country in the world and yet hundreds of thousands of people are not getting these benefits just because the state and federal governments are watching each other and asking, ‘Okay, how much money should we put in?'” he said.
United demands more funds
The local legal aid agencies jointly called for the Commonwealth to double its current funding for these services to at least $270 million per year over the next five years.
They called for an additional $95 million for on-the-ground work to combat domestic and family violence and $35 million to stabilize the sector’s precarious workforce.
A spokesman for Western Australia’s Attorney-General John Quigley said the federal government was aware of the pressures facing community legal services and pointed to the $44.1 million in “urgent funding” it had committed for 2024-2025.
The spokesman said Commonwealth, state and territory governments would consider recommendations from a recent review of the sector for inclusion in the next mutual legal assistance agreement in July 2025.
